That's not funny!
Sep. 25th, 2004 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevQ: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: That's not funny!
Okay, now that I have that out of my system (again)...
Welcome to year six of sev's ruminations on humor. Today's subject: parody.
I have, it's important to note, a stunted sense of humor. I must, for the number of times I'm told to stop being so sensitive because they're just kidding. (That, by the way, was sarcasm.) I also just don't understand Monty Python. (That part is simply unfortunate truth.)
Humor can be anything from a coping mechanism to a tool for social change. It can also be a weapon wielded by the status quo to keep the disenfranchised from getting too full of [them/our]selves. The difference isn't always clear-cut.
That's why parody is hard.
(this is where I get vague. I think what follows may be an outline for a much longer piece.)
I wonder if I should distinguish between "parody" and garden-variety cruelty via mockery? The former has a message, or a point, beyond simply "look at that, isn't it silly?"
Parody has includes a value judgment -- this particular trait being caricatured is *bad*.
The simplest parody relies on the audience bringing a context with them to flesh out the value judgment. A parody is generally a specific instance of a person, situation, or behavior. The context informs which specifics are relevant to the parody. The parodied person may have an identifiable gender, race or class; how does the audience tell which of those are relevant to the parody, and which are orthogonal?
As there are myriad negative stereotypes surrounding most marginalized cultures, it's common to associate the value-judgment involved in parody with one side or another of any power-gradients present in the portrayal, regardless of whether that association was intended by the author. When that's *not* the association intended by the author, the parody falls flat and/or misses its target.
Furthermore, the intent of parody is to disempower its target. This is what makes it an effective tool for political change; in extreme cases, it's one of the only redresses available to an oppressed community. This is also, unfortunately, what makes it so offensive when it backfires. It's not in good taste for people to stomp on those who are already less fortunate than they are. Because parody suggests a value judgment, the behaviors or traits most commonly chosen for parody are those which can be easily established as "bad", either due to context explicitly provided by the author or implicitly brought along by the audience. And in the latter case, when the value judgment is implicitly supplied by the audience, that's going to be a judgment already extant in common culture.
Thus, the crux of the problem. Not all value judgments that are part of our common culture are healthy ones.
When a parody (or any kind of humor?) intersects a pathological cultural value judgment, the target of the parody can be unclear. Is it lampooning a behavior? Is it lampooning the marginalization of that behavior?
Effective parody should, therefore, include a scathing portrayal of the forces that create or reinforce the exact situation or problem being parodied. Otherwise, it's no better than mocking a marginalized behavior (and that's just crass).
A: That's not funny!
Okay, now that I have that out of my system (again)...
Welcome to year six of sev's ruminations on humor. Today's subject: parody.
I have, it's important to note, a stunted sense of humor. I must, for the number of times I'm told to stop being so sensitive because they're just kidding. (That, by the way, was sarcasm.) I also just don't understand Monty Python. (That part is simply unfortunate truth.)
Humor can be anything from a coping mechanism to a tool for social change. It can also be a weapon wielded by the status quo to keep the disenfranchised from getting too full of [them/our]selves. The difference isn't always clear-cut.
That's why parody is hard.
(this is where I get vague. I think what follows may be an outline for a much longer piece.)
I wonder if I should distinguish between "parody" and garden-variety cruelty via mockery? The former has a message, or a point, beyond simply "look at that, isn't it silly?"
Parody has includes a value judgment -- this particular trait being caricatured is *bad*.
The simplest parody relies on the audience bringing a context with them to flesh out the value judgment. A parody is generally a specific instance of a person, situation, or behavior. The context informs which specifics are relevant to the parody. The parodied person may have an identifiable gender, race or class; how does the audience tell which of those are relevant to the parody, and which are orthogonal?
As there are myriad negative stereotypes surrounding most marginalized cultures, it's common to associate the value-judgment involved in parody with one side or another of any power-gradients present in the portrayal, regardless of whether that association was intended by the author. When that's *not* the association intended by the author, the parody falls flat and/or misses its target.
Furthermore, the intent of parody is to disempower its target. This is what makes it an effective tool for political change; in extreme cases, it's one of the only redresses available to an oppressed community. This is also, unfortunately, what makes it so offensive when it backfires. It's not in good taste for people to stomp on those who are already less fortunate than they are. Because parody suggests a value judgment, the behaviors or traits most commonly chosen for parody are those which can be easily established as "bad", either due to context explicitly provided by the author or implicitly brought along by the audience. And in the latter case, when the value judgment is implicitly supplied by the audience, that's going to be a judgment already extant in common culture.
Thus, the crux of the problem. Not all value judgments that are part of our common culture are healthy ones.
When a parody (or any kind of humor?) intersects a pathological cultural value judgment, the target of the parody can be unclear. Is it lampooning a behavior? Is it lampooning the marginalization of that behavior?
Effective parody should, therefore, include a scathing portrayal of the forces that create or reinforce the exact situation or problem being parodied. Otherwise, it's no better than mocking a marginalized behavior (and that's just crass).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-09-25 09:13 pm (UTC)